WHY MUHAMMADU BUHARI DOES NOT BELONG IN OUR FUTURE

I recently had a phone conversation with a dear compatriot who just shared with me a desire to support Muhammadu Buhari for president, come 2015 elections.  The conversation we had convinced me to put down these thoughts that have been with me for quite some time now.

Let me start by saying that it is a sign of how much military rule destroyed our sense of what is right and our relationship to history that dictators like Buhari and Ibrahim Babangida are still respected figures in our public life.  But that is a topic for another day.

Here are my reasons why no one who is exercised by Nigeria’s and, by extension, Africa’s future, as well as that of African-descended peoples everywhere, must actively campaign against the likes of Buhari and, while we are at it, Abubakar Atiku, when it comes to our future.

Buhari is an unrepentant, unapologetic, unreconstructed dictator in whom I am yet to see the requisite democratic temperament beyond persistently presenting himself for elections.  In case Nigerians need any reminder—that we do is itself a scandal—this was the man who, with Tunde Idiagbon, presided over a military regime that dehumanized Nigerians in the name of some spurious “War Against Indiscipline”.  It was a regime under whose jackboots the dignity of many Nigerian women was assaulted at airports and other points of entry with humiliating body cavity searches in the name of some crazy war on drug trafficking.  It is interesting that while the country that manufactured the original war on drugs is beating itself up on its stupidity, we are about to honour the man who led a regime that perpetrated indignities on Nigerians in the name of that same war!  Is it any wonder that we don’t get any respect from the rest of the world?

As if the indignities were not enough by themselves, this was a man who signed execution warrants for three young Nigerians convicted of drug trafficking under a law that also recognized their right to appeal their conviction to a higher court.  They were executed while their appeal had not, repeat not concluded.  I do not recall that under military rule, the suspension of the constitution included the suspension of the doctrine of the presumption of innocence of the accused until such a person is convicted.  Might I add that that conviction is not final until all appeals have been concluded.  In other words, Buhari and the goons he led murdered three young Nigerians who were still presumed innocent according to our legal system, even under military rule.  In a decent society—and ours is not a decent society—Buhari will be in the dock answering charges for his shameful and illegal behavior.  But we are such amnesiacs; we think he could and should be president.

Meanwhile, his so-called war on corruption for which everyone pretends to celebrate him was not a model of consistency.  Neither was the ethnicity-inflected justice that his tribunals meted out to erring politicians.   For me, the matter of the emir’s suitcases pales into insignificance against the ethnically-modulated pattern of (in)justice in the trials of so-called corrupt public officials of the Second Republic.  I am sure that not many Nigerians now recall the first public office-holder jailed for corruption by the Buhari\Idiagbon regime.  That would be Olabisi Onabanjo, the first civilian governor of Ogun State.  I recall telling people then that there was something wrong with that picture; I still think there is.  It probably was one reason why Fela wondered why Shehu Shagari was not put on trial but governors and other office-holders were.  In his inimitable parlance: “Driver get accident; na conductor you charge to court”.  The Niger State governor who was found with six million naira overseas did not quickly come up for trial; neither did the Kano State governor for whom there was no trouble with banking government money in government house.  Their trials would all come later.

More noteworthy was the fact that no, repeat, no Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) governor, not Ambrose Alli, not Bola Ige, not Onabanjo, was convicted of personal enrichment; they were guilty of using government funds to enrich their parties.  Yet, they were the first to be sent to jail!  The irony is completely lost on Buhari’s apologists when they proclaim his personal incorruptibility; a similar claim could be made of the UPN governors he was eager to imprison for presiding over a corrupt system.

Please don’t tell me about his stewardship of the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF).  First, anyone who was associated with the Abacha regime does not deserve any place in Nigeria’s public life and, definitely, in Nigeria’s future.  In the second place, PTF, EFCC, ICPC, and the innumerable extra-judicial organs that litter the Nigerian political landscape are relics of failure rather than icons of administrative genius.  Saudi Arabia, Mexico, the Gulf States did not need a PTF to put their oil windfall into proper financial institutions to ensure that their oil was turned from income into wealth.  Does PTF have such a record?  When did it become a sign of good economic management that you sit on accumulated money while your economy contracts?  So, if part of what recommends Buhari for president is his stewardship of the PTF as an organ of development, it must be that amnesia is even less a problem than economic illiteracy that borders on collective idiocy.

Beyond his military service, I do not see any evidence that Buhari is interested in the project called Nigeria beyond the insistence of the dominant elite in the northern part of the country that their sons must be at Nigeria’s helm.  I do not say this lightly and I say it in spite of the risk of being labelled.  I am not worried about being labelled.  He has never publicly opposed Sharia and that is one of the most toxic features of contemporary Nigerian polity and politics.  No politician who is ambivalent about Sharia can be part of a salubrious future for a country like Nigeria.  Incidentally, he could borrow a leaf from Mahathir Mohammed on this score.  But Nigerian Islam and contemporary Christianity are not about Reason or ideas.  His Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) definitely did not acquit itself well after the last presidential elections and his ominous wait to condemn the violence still rankles.  Where is the evidence of any change on his part on this score?

Finally, it is a matter for great pity that the All Progressive Congress (APC) has proven itself to be more interested in power than in making a country that we all can be proud of.  No thanks to its unthinking addiction to winning power and its even greater thoughtlessness in believing that it can do so by gathering the rejects of the ruling party, the APC can only deepen the cynicism and apathy of the electorate.  It is a disgrace that the best the party that styles itself ‘progressive’ can do is to tout two retreads as its change agents  when what the country needs are spanking new treads!  If the permutation is to win in the north, I wish them luck.  But it is the surest path to giving Goodluck Jonathan a second-term he does not deserve but will get because the other party has not shown itself to be any different from the PDP.  Jonathan did not win the north that last time around; neither does he need it this time.  APC can still withdraw from this path to self-destruction.  Buhari is part of a past well let alone.  Only the future should matter and nothing about him speaks to this future.

Published in http://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2014/10/22/why-muhammadu-buhari-does-not-belong-in-our-future/
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MAY THEY NOT REST IN PEACE

I hope that Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ won’t mind my citing his recent “Give Them a Dose of Pain!” in PM News, September 16, 2013, as my inspiration for this article.  In that piece, angered and frustrated by the repeated losses and exasperations foisted on humanity by our Bible-thumping televangelist hustlers and their physical emporia planted on what are supposed to be thoroughfares, forget expressway, Adeeko had invoked the same Bible-derived imprecations that our modern-day zealots love to direct at their enemies, seen and unseen, witches and wizards, and so on, and asked that they be the recipients of unabated evil and suffering.

As my title indicates, this article, too, wishes to invoke imprecations.  The difference, this time, is that I do not take my cue from Christianity or even from that other domesticated religion of alien origins, Islam.  I shall spell out the difference presently.  First, let me outline what set me off on this occasion.

For us Nigerians, wherever we are in the world, cannot be indifferent to news of fresh atrocities committed by that band of Muslim fanatics, Boko Haram.  Simultaneously, it is difficult to deny that the routinisation of death and mayhem in Nigerian life makes it extremely difficult for one not to become blasé about yet another Boko Haram massacre.  It is one orientation one must stoutly resist.  First, it was the attack on high school students with at least 40 young lives prematurely ended that grabbed the headlines.  Then came the massacre of 95 at the School of Agriculture in a night raid.  While I grieved, I was also mindful of the Nigerian government’s basic inability to secure the lives of its citizens, even in their poverty.

The carnage at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi was particularly devastating for me.  Its singularity—compared to the routinisation I just alluded to—on one hand, and the that-could-have-been-me characteristic of its many victims, on the other, make it particularly harrowing.  That it claimed the life, too, of one of the world’s top poets, scholar, and statesman, Kofi Awoonor, who was in Nairobi for another celebration of the life of the mind supplied an added personal dimension; magnified by the fact that many of us, denizens of the life of the mind, could well have been any of those victims.

I was still reeling from that when news broke that more than 300 African migrants headed for Lampedusa were missing and feared dead when their barely seaworthy vessel capsized in the treacherous waters of the Mediterranean.  Again, this is not an isolated incident but its frequency should not render us impervious to the tragedy that it represents.  And the numbers are simply chilling.

Then came the news of the crash in Lagos shortly after take-off of a plane that was carrying the remains of the former governor of Ondo State to Akure for burial in his hometown.  It got personal when it was confirmed that one of the casualties was Deji Falae, the Ondo State Commissioner for Tourism.  He was one of the principal hosts for a conference we recently held in Akure to commemorate D.O. Fagunwa who, I hope, needs no introduction.  That the late Deji Falae was present for the entire duration of the conference, not out of a sense of duty, but as one deeply interested in the life of the mind that was being marked endeared him to all of us and that first impression—it was my only time ever meeting him—is one that will now remain with me.  The Yorùbá are right: Igi tó tọ́ kìí pẹ́ nígbó.

Needless to say, as I wrote to my friends in Kenya during the massacre, it is my hope that all who are affected by the losses that I have been recounting are comforted and that their memories shall remain evergreen in the hearts of those they left behind.

Notice that I have not prayed that their souls should rest in peace.  The idea that departed souls should rest in peace and our repeated, almost mindless, invocation of that prayer is a part of received wisdom derived from Christianity and Islam.  The idea that “the labourer’s task is o’er” and she has earned eternal repose flows from the theology that sees our earthly existence in a negative light and death, any death, however procured, is to be viewed as a welcome release into the eternal peace of in the Lord’s or Allah’s domain.

The recent deaths have forced me to take another look at this comforting wish.  All of them are needless, yes, needless deaths.  It may be easier to persuade people of the needlessness of the deaths caused by religious zealotry and political brigandage.  But the same is not true of the deaths in the Mediterranean or the untimely death of the able commissioner and other casualties of the plane crash.  Certainly, some might argue that the migrants took the risk that they did and it is too bad that it ended badly.  After all, life gives no guarantees to anyone.  And, for the victims of the plane crash, accidents are a fact of life.  Unfortunate though it is, we cannot put them on the same pedestal as those cut down just for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

This is where the wisdom of Òrìsà, Yorùbá religion properly understood, becomes compelling and incredibly insightful.  In Yorùbá metaphysics there is a distinction between good death and bad death.  We cannot go into any detailed explication of this distinction here.  One key difference should suffice: a good death is celebrated, worthy of emulation, and is what all desire to be privileged to undergo when their time comes to exit the world.  A bad death, on the other hand, is dreaded, to be shunned, and those who exit by it barely rate a mention in subsequent remembrances. 

But this is what is most significant about this view of death native to Yorùbá religion: the departed are not supposed to nor are they expected to enter into eternal repose, however their death may have come about.  The dear departed who exit through good death are asked to make a return to their families and even if they do not return, they are tasked never to sleep in the world beyond.  Rather they are charged to keep looking back at and out for those they have left behind to ensure that no evil befalls the latter and that their lives do prosper.  Nowhere is there any suggestion that they work of the departed on earth is concluded by their passing or that their passing in the best of circumstances is a ticket to eternal peace.

Those who exit by way of bad death are even more put upon after their deaths.  If their bad death had been caused by their own acts of commission or omission, they are banished from the memory of their survivors and every effort is made to knock their GPS out of order to ensure that their spirits do not, repeat, do not, find their way back to their families.  But if there is reason to believe that the death is needless, that it has been brought about by malevolent forces or by the hands some enemy or ill-wisher, the charge to the departed is more drastic and stark.  Their task is spelt out: “do not rest until you have avenged your death,” seems to be the charge to the dead.  On occasion, the burial is delayed in order to perform some rituals designed to fortify the corpse to execute the revenge mission on those who may have had a hand in her death.  The remains are interred only after this mission is accomplished.

One does not have to subscribe to the beliefs just iterated.  What they tell us, and this is why they are important, is that we have here a different attitude to death and its aftermath.  I am saying that there is something to be said for re-engaging a piece of indigenous wisdom derived from Yorùbá religion and metaphysics.  On that score, it is out of place to ask that the victims of the bad deaths we have been considering rest in peace.  Quite the contrary, our demand\prayer, if it be that, should be: May they not rest in peace!

It may indeed be the case that the quietude that has been urged on our dear but needlessly departed in the aftermath of their demise is the worst legacy of our embrace of Christianity and Islam.  What if, instead of resting in peace, the ghosts of all the slaves who were tossed into the Atlantic Ocean during the Middle Passage were to continue to haunt the descendants of all humans involved in the perpetration of and profit from that crime against humanity?  What if our leaders were haunted by the angry spirits of all our children who died needlessly in infancy for want of appropriate and accessible medical care and adequate nutrition?  Or those of victims of fake drugs?  Poorly maintained road networks?  Importation and distribution of fake automobile parts?  Of badly maintained airlines and dubious owners and operators?  Of incompetent and corrupt government regulators whose lapses in their oversight functions lead to aircraft that are disguised flying coffins?  Or governments that run their countries into the ground and make attractive, if not inevitable, for their young to brave the desert or the seas for better prospects anywhere but the lands of their births?

It is time that we had our collective peace profoundly disturbed by those we have dispatched to early and needless deaths by our lack of heed.  May the souls of the departed not rest in peace; may we not find peace from their torment.

See published version at http://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2013/10/09/may-they-not-rest-in-peace/